


an anthem to the rotten. (the 808s and heartbeats remix)

by blackestofmarkets



Category: Homestuck, MS Paint Adventures
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Light Dom/sub, M/M, Multi, Stridercest - Freeform
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-30
Packaged: 2018-12-01 13:03:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11486958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackestofmarkets/pseuds/blackestofmarkets
Summary: there's an aching in your bodyand it's been there for a whileand oh child you are so hungrythat you don't know how to smile.In which Dirk is sure that if his ego were as big as his penchant for self-immolation, he would split this town at the seams.





	1. and you don't give a damn about me.

Your name is Dirk Strider.

 

You never really got the hang of movies.

 

Sure, you can throw down with the best of them when it comes to it, talk about expositional value, the decline of one-shot takes in modern cinematography and the modern-day American exceptionalism portrayed through feel-good Hallmark movies that run every Thanksgiving and are about as kitschy as your Aunt Mildred’s dining room porcelain Chihuahuas.

You could talk ego building via self-deprecation à la Tarantino or genuine introspective hatred via the pseudo chutzpah Michael Bay puts on these days. In fact, you could talk about it ‘til your mouth feels like a rubber band wrapped around a lunchbox a few too many times.

 

But you never really got it. Especially not the kind of narration that begins with the hapless protagonist stating his or her name in a cheap introductory scene to establish a premise that will turn out about as unique as others of its kind.

Which is to say, not at all. 

 

Never have seen movies as more than an asshole in a suit and sunglasses being paid an obscene amount of money (and isn’t _that_ the sort of irony you like to cut through and examine with a very fine scalpel), no matter how you might rave to Jake about the unbridled brilliance of the SBaHJ franchise or the comedic potential of whatever romance flick you catch him fawning about.

Mostly they feature somewhat blue-ish tinged female leads.

Mostly these days you don’t hate him for it anymore.

 

The thing is, what nobody tells you about getting older is this:

You fall out of love with things and people and people and things that you swore you’d stay with forever.

And then you come back one day, you stumble upon those feelings buried in a crevice somewhere in the back of your brain and your heart stumbles over itself in an embarrassing little beat.

You’ve opened up Pandora’s box and what’s worst isn’t all the monsters or the memories or even the mnemonics that stem from comparing the two of them.

It’s the fucking hope buried beyond it.

 

Because that shit gets you every time when you least expect it, marches up to you while you’re wide-eyed and wondering while you look back on all of it through an inverted kaleidoscope out of golden dust and stabs you right in the lung like some punk stealing your wallet.

The diagnosis pneumothorax never sounded so good.

 

This is how you lost Jake.

 

This is how you’ll lose Dave.

 

###### 

 

“Yeah, no need to say anything.”

 

From where you’re sitting at the kitchen island at nine in the evening, staring into your cereal bowl and wondering if it’s too late to figure out if you’re lactose intolerant if you can only drown your pathetic Cinnamon Crunch with a gallon of milk, you can almost feel Dave’s gaze between your shoulderblades. Even through his shades, even despite the fact that you’re facing towards the table and he’s in the process of shucking his shoes off. You can hear the soles of his leather moccasins hitting the floor with a wet slap and figure it will only be about fifteen seconds or less before he sighs, bends down and tries to straighten the scuffed outsole.

For someone with such a taste in atrocious footwear, he is diligent with his clothes. You figure it comes from growing up just above the poverty threshold. You’ve certainly never seen him waste any food and as much as the press likes to rave on about the suits he wears to his premiers, you know for a fact that all he does is shine them up every half-year and combine them with a different tie.

 

Rose always gives him ties for Christmas. You think it’s hilarious. He thinks it’s degrading.

 

“Just drown me in that silence, you know how I like it,” his voice, disembodied and ephemeral in the face of your reflection in the milk continues from somewhere behind you and honestly you had forgotten he had asked you something.

“Rain upon me an avalanche of nonverbiage, I’m rolling in the torrent of conversational pointers you’re rolling out here. Right in the middle of it you’ll see my middle finger sticking out of this abundance of awkward dead quiet, shining on like a beacon for all to see and get offended by. Here lies Dave Strider, they’ll say. Defiant to the end until the noiselessness made it so.”

 

That actually makes you snort while you turn your attention back to your phone where for the past half hour you have been busied with some inane three-in-a-row game. The shitty jpegs and constant buffering make it even less playable and just that is what you revel in. Dave got half an aneurysm the last time he looked over your shoulder. Considering the hot and fresh fucking mess that his last movie was, you called it hypocrisy and tried not to think about the warmth of his breath against your hand as you’d held it up for him to inspect, the way he’d bent over the couch to call you an invitation to an epilepsy attack.

 

“Nah, dude,” you finally reply, smudging your fingers over the screen to match up three highly pixelated Shire Horse heads, the audio port of your phone giving a static little fanfare at a successful move that someone in India probably downloaded from soundpirates.com.

“They’ll take you as a warning to the case in question. Mothers will be telling their children about you as they pass by. _Don’t end up like him_ , they’ll say whilst checking their To-Do lists and crossing off getting avocadoes from their organic Whole Foods that has suddenly appeared right next to a massive barrage of inarticulateness. Now they’ll only have to get new cloth diapers from their high end cotton baby store and take little Charlene to her cello lesson. You’ll be merely the victim in a story used to scare little trust fund kids into going to bed at seven in the evening. Dave, that guy who didn’t listen.”

 

You wish you could say you’re indifferent when you look up at him and he’s got that infuriating little smirk on his face, the one that says you’re being somehow _precious_. He got that same look on his face when you were forced into a school play of _Tarzan_ in third grade.

You played the role of a tree and hated every single minute of it. In every photo and every second of the VHS, because of course he recorded everything just to spite you, you have a firm scowl on your face and look like you are going to grab your papermachee costume and firmly swing it at Ms. Steinberg, your Arts teacher at the time.

It’s not surprising you got a C in that class that year.

 

“As much as I don’t want to take away from your own overinflated notion of what you call your ego, because that child therapist I talked to when you started puberty told me I should never invalidate your feelings,” he calls out from where he’s shrugging off his jacket with the kind of fluid motion that even in the window pane you watch it looks like he does it for a living.

“But in the words of our eternal King, may his emigration process to Cuba have proceeded smoothly and without anyone recognizing him in the airport: _get your little Junior Whopper click smoked up_.”

 

He’s quoting 2Pac at you in the firm conviction that as a millennial, even one raised by him of all people, you won’t recognize the epic slam dunk that was _Hit ‘Em Up_ when he rubs your nose in it like a puppy that pissed the carpet. Unluckily for him, you’ve been listening to diss tracks when you were still sleeping in a a crib at the foot of his own bed in a shitty downtown Austin apartment, before Houston, before The Hills.

 

“Fuck off,” you gripe, halfway between irritated that he thinks he’s won so easily and exhilarated that he’s actually awake enough to engage your little mental spar. These last weeks have been hell on the both of you. The newest garbage diamond he is adding to his golden trashpile of collected Academy Awards and Platinum Records for soundtracks sold (ironically, on a shitty 256 megabytes stick that crashes more times than it loads the music) isn’t quite locked in yet, still stuck in the underbelly of hell that is post-production.

 

You?

You just haven’t felt like sleeping in the last few days.

God, you’re a dunce.

 

“Don’t be throwing the New York shooting at me when you can’t handle the Biggie, man. I’m Jay-Z-ing it all up in this Crooklyn bullshit and you’re Notorious B.I.G. trying to impress me on the second diss verse of _Who Shot Ya_. But wait.”

Finally deeming this conversation to be more important than whatever Lippizaner is desperately blinking in an attempt to regain your attention and finally unite him with his fellow two brothers, you put your phone face-down in a calculated attempt to get Dave to nag you about scratching up the display again and look up.

 

He’s leaning against the kitchen counter with an apple in his hands, perfectly white capped teeth taking a bite out of it and your misophonia basically winces as you hear a crunch. Only Dave can make eating a goddamn fruit look like he’s being a goddamn violent asshole. Shitting noise all over the place like he’s elderly with a diagnosis of incontinence. Just can’t hold all those mouth farts, man. Can’t hold ‘em.

 

“There’s more,” you continue after a deliberate pause when it’s clear his attention is on you and he’s doing nothing except roll around the piece he’s bitten off in his mouth slowly whilst sucking out the juice. Except of just chewing it down like a normal person.

What a complete and utter asshole. Or maybe you’re just projecting and you’re the douchebag in this scenario here, reacting to your older brother’s friendly prodding and the utterly normal act of him grabbing a bite after a long and strenuous day.

 

You consider it for a second.

Nah.

What an asshole.

 

“You’re coming at me with unfounded paranoia, bro. I can see your Capgras delusion from over here. With that level of immersion in a pipe dream you could almost star in your very own Mario level,”

The treacherous part of your hindbrain and maybe your dick as well fuckin’ lighting up at seeing him cop a smirk at your counter.

“Yo,” you continue, raising your hand in a pseudo MTV music video gesture that only works so well because you look so awkward doing it.

“You may believe that _you saw me in the drop, three and a quarter, slaughter, electrical tape around your daughter_ but there’s no way in hell I’m gonna give you what you need when _old school, new school, need to learn though; that I burn, baby, burn like Disco Inferno_.”

 

Dave is quiet after this for a second while you’re mentally congratulating yourself on his prolonged thoughtful silence, as smug as ever can be.

“There’s no way I’m letting you all C-Gutta up Roxy,” he finally says, looking almost fond and you want to _brain yourself in the head with an anvil_.

“Rose would scalp me and as much as politically incorrect movies about the life of early Native Americans might have you believe that it’s a fun and easy way to get little kids in the movie theatre to giggle in exhilaration, I’d rather not make a home movie about the gruesome truth.”

 

This. This is why in the last three weeks you haven’t exchanged more than a casual barb with him.

Well, this and the fact that he’s been out of the house by six and back by ten and when he’s home, you can smell the cigarette smoke from his room and hear him pacing. Cursing, when he thinks you’re asleep, because he might fancy himself a movie director and one of the tough sort, but Dave is first and foremost your parent. And oh, how that thought stings.

 

It’s not the reference to your best friend and cousin, it isn’t even the fact that he’s basically verbosely adopting her, it’s the goddamn hairsplitting he’s engaging in when in his newest movie he has Geromy starring mostly with an oversized watermelon on his head and a whole chicken in his hand. But of course that is sardonic. His pedantry considering the accuracy of movies is enough to rival his love for loudly and candidly criticizing shitty ones when you’re trying to play _Doctor Kawashima’s Brain Training_ without headphones in the living room.

 

“Tell that to the guy who’s doing the latest one about the Trail of Tears,” you drawl, deeming this conversation over to a degree satisfactory enough that you simultaneously want to save the way his mouth curled around the way he said _you know how I like it_ in your mental spank bank and just get the fuck out of this situation real fast.

It ends in a compromise in which you just unlock your phone again, ignoring the red little “3” at the top right corner of your Social Media folder, which you just got to make fun of Dave, who actually has one unironically.

He says it’s to manage all the script requests he gets when his manager fucks up and doesn’t filter them. You say it’s so he can read all the articles about himself after a premiere in the mobile app of inTouch or People.

He pays for this shit. _Monthly_. You could probably finance yourself a sweet mixer with all the money he’s been wasting of subscription of B-class magazines. Shit, you could buy yourself a fucking full set of tables with the dough he’s shelling out. The dough could be used to make some sweet ass pizza that’d be circling round your pre-amps, gently baking from the fire you’re dropping because, as they say, your mixtape is absolutely _lit_.

 

Not that you couldn’t anyway. But it’s about the precept of it.

 

“I can already bet you my sweet, sweet ass that it’s gonna be containing at least two instances of inappropriately used war bonnets and probably major failures in the area of indigenous spiritualism.”

 

Only when the silence stretches on long enough do you actually raise your head up to see him looking at you with the kind of expression that to others would virtually align 100% with what he usually looks like, be it in public or on the glossy pages of the magazines you make fun of Dave for reading online but secretly stash away under your bed to feature in your figments of imagination.

You figure that it’s so obvious, no one would look there anyways and you always have the excuse of faking his autograph and selling them off to the trust fund kids at your school.

To you, though, it’s unfamiliar and irritating in same rights and you suddenly feel transported back to the tender age of nine again, trying to evade the ham-handed councillor’s questions.

_Does your brother ever let you go to bed hungry, Dirk?_

_Do you ever play games together you don’t like, Dirk?_

_Are you happy there, Dirk?_

_Dirk?_

 

“Yo, save your heinie for your equally hare-brained and –canined beau there, whippersnapper,” Dave replies finally and your brain snaps back to reality so fast you can hear Eminem going _“oh there goes gravity”_ in your head.

“Old man like me can’t keep up with you young paramours these days anymore. I have finally begun my transformation into a crotchety old veteran.”

 

“In no time you’ll be yelling at those meddling kids to get off your lawn if you ain’t throwing Werther’s candy at them,” you reply, cracking a grin despite the nebulous sinking feeling right where your pubic bone meets your soft viscera.

You haven’t told him about Jake and you (or rather, not-Jake-and-you-anymore) yet and if you play your cards right, you don’t plan on doing so for the next few months or so. At least let him have the illusion that you are somewhat adept at scoring mad, tanned and shorted tail.

 

“Wearing slippers and a robe during my allotted timeframe of watching daytime television.”

 

“Probably smells like moth balls and ammonia ‘cause you haven’t changed your sheets in weeks now.”

 

“Driving 30 on the I-20 interstate. Behind me a line of annoyed teenagers in their first Acura and menopausal women fanning themselves during a heat flash. I’m responsible for at least twenty percent of all road rage related accidents in the Lone Star State.”

 

“Don’t underestimate yourself, man. Believe in your dreams, I know you can do at least twenty-five, both percent and miles per hour.”

 

For a minute everything’s just fucking peachy, just like he and you used to be before the last year transformed you into a teenager when everything was new and strange and he headed off to his latest endeavour featuring his two favourite characters in the world. Well, maybe except you, because as much as you as a teenage dirtbag appreciate your Wheatus-esque selfishness, you know he loves you. Wholeheartedly. Unironically.

 

What you don’t know is why after that brief moment of luminescence radiating straight through your skin and into your bones he pushes himself off the counter with an ease that make your mouth dry and leans sideways to grab the folder which you know contains the script for tomorrow’s scenes they’re locking and syncing.

No clumsy messenger bag or embarrassing leather briefcase for Dave Strider, no siree. Instead he exits the apartment every day with this monstrosity you made for him in kindergarten.

It’s bright fucking neon yellow and in the beginning had about a dozen stickers on it, most of them of the glittery variety. Now, after almost fourteen years of continuous use, the sparkle has dimmed to a dull grey and the edges are half-ripped, spine taped with sello to keep it from falling apart. The only thing still clearly visible is the crayon **DAVE** you carefully inscripted in uneven letters on the front.

About every six months, you practically beg of him to get a new one. You even offered to _make_ him one to showcase the depths you will go to in your desperation to get rid of that thing. But nothing sways him and you suspect with mortification that he actually genuinely likes it, the fucking nerd.

 

You get interrupted in your ponderings of a situation where the stupid thing self-immolates and Dave stands by with tears in his eyes whilst you self-satisfiedly watch from a distance by another notification on your phone when a fourth message hits your inbox with a pop you like to imagine as your dignity hitting the ground hard and fast. Dave doesn’t seem too bothered by it, instead heading across the kitchen towards his office with the folder in his hand after having messed up your hair with one hand, tugging at your gelled ends for a split second.

 

“Don’t stay up too long, Mr. Popular,” he calls out in his parodying take on what he calls _Parent Ex Machina_ in popular media. He is already in the hallway and you’re left reeling with the phantom feeling of adeft digits on your scalp.

Your post-pubertism making itself known with the stirrings of what could be a very embarrassing hard-on right in the middle of the goddamn kitchen.

“If you get too entangled by those jungle vines I ain’t writing you an excuse letter until the tail end of this month. You’ll have to fake it all by your lonesome.”

 

And with the slam of his door so evaporate the last tendrils of your dignity. You, at least, have the good sense to shove your bowl of cereal aside like Rebecca Black just caught her friends kicking in the front seat before your forehead hits the surface of the table with a thud so audible you almost expect Dave to open his door again and tell you to stop damaging the kitchen appliances out of sheer horniness. You can almost hear his voice. Almost see his facial expression, the slight tick of his eyebrow over his impassive face.

 

You can almost feel the way his fingers pulled your head back slightly, big enough to envelop your whole dick, if he wanted to.

  
“Fuck,” you enunciate very carefully against the cool marble surface.

 

From the side you can hear your phone buzzing again.

 

###### 

 

\-- tipsyGnostalgic [TG]  began pestering timaeusTestified [TT]  \-- 

TG: soooooo

TG: im thinking ur lack of a response means u are either taking one of ur LONG ASS showers again 

TG: or u have finally managed 2 become one w/ur bed 

TG: am i rite or am i rite 

TT: You caught me. At last, I have transcended the mere planes of existence that hold my body back in this mortal coil. 

TT: Finally I will fulfil my longstanding dream to become a real coverlet. 

TT: It will be only mere hours before the transformation is complete. 

TG: lololol 

TG: send me a hellol from the other side once ur transmorgificilation is complete 

TG: *transmogrification 

TT: I’ll send you a downy feather as a souvenir if that’ll satisfy your curiosity. 

TT: How deep are you in wizard slash fiction right now? 

TT: Wait, don’t answer that. 

TG: ehehehehe 

TG: BALLS deep 

TT: Goddamn it, Roxy. 

TG: lmao u kno im always here to react 2 ur overwrought star trek references 

TG: and in most cases be the cause of em too 

TT: How gracious of you. 

TG: i live 2 oblige 

TG: no but srsly its been months 

TG: like do i call in the brokn heart brigade 

TG: do i send u a singing telegram telling you that child things r gonna get BETTER?? 

TG: worse yet do i have 2 rip a certain someone a new one 

TT: First off, I ain’t even sure ‘worse yet’ is even a phrase you with your ineffable grasp on the English language and syntax can allow yourself to use. Just because ‘better yet’ exists doesn’t mean this is grammatically correct. 

TT: Two wrongs a right not make. 

TG: f u master yoda my syntaxes r flawless 

TG: FAWLLESS i tell u 

TT: That one was on purpose. 

TG: busted i aint even gonna try and correct that one 

TT: Secondly, and I know how this sounds from the likes of me. 

TT: But I’m fine. 

TT: Before you say “UR NOT”, listen up for a second. 

TG: UR NO 

TG: fine ok im listening but only bc u asked nicely 

TG: by which i mean not at alllll 

TT: I know that this whole shebang with me and him didn’t really end in anything else than a flaming trainwreck. You can probably still see a burning wheel rolling away from it like a tumbleweed across the screen of an outdated Western. 

TT: Everyone inside is burnt to a crisp. From a distance, the townfolk survey the whole debacle. Most of them have a straw in their mouths. 

TT: “Real mess if y’all askin’ me,” the town sheriff says in a broad Alabama drawl, pausing only to spit his wad of chewing tobacco at the ground. 

TT: Way out in the wilderness a cold coyote calls. 

TG: dirk omfg stop it with the bob dylan references 

TT: Sorry. 

TT: But I spent the past few months absolutely drenched in distaste against my actions. I’ve been saturated like one of Dave’s movie posters. 100% moist like Jane’s slutty brownies. 

TT: My auto-antagonism was SUPERABUNDANT. Almost as much as Hal's. 

TT: What I’m getting at though is: it happened. It was shit and I regret everything with every single fibre of my being. Even the ones that probably caused this whole acne scenario in tenth grade. But it’s done now and as much as I’m probably going to self-flagellate myself for the continued few months, I can’t really do much. 

TG: u looked like a streuselkuchen u big goof 

TG: but r u okay tho 

TG: i kno u said ur fine but that doesnt equal okay in my books 

TT: If I ain’t now, I sure as fuck ain’t gonna prefer stewing in my own invidiousness. 

TT: That’s the kind of stew that’s proverbially hard to swallow and even harder to keep down. There’s unidentified clumps swimming in this shit and I’m pretty sure the cook spit in it a few times while I wasn’t looking. 

TG: atta boy thats the dirk i know 

TG: dont let some stupid boy w/ dentition so bucky it could star in tha new avengers movie keep u from realizing ur dreams 

TG: u can do it 

TG: u can rise like a phoenix 

TG: also ewwww @ wads of mystery meat 

TT: If you can’t beat the magical girl, be the magical girl, right? 

TG: fuckin RIGHT 

TT: This… actually helped. 

TT: Thanks, I guess. For putting up with this squared circle of BS: 

TG: anytime 

TG: thats what weird cousinsisters r there for arent they 

TG: in the meantime u need 2 get ur mind off tha whole jenglish mess and aunt roxy has just the right recipe to fix u right up again 

TT: You do realize that you’re a day younger than I am. 

TG: AS I WAS SAYIGN  
TG: * saying gdi dirk i was actually beating my record against myself there 

TG: you need a distraction and ur actually legal now 

TG: so whos stopping you from going out and getting that TAIL now that ur young and wild and free 

TG: in fact have been for several months now 

TG: and its not like u got ur eyes on someone else right 

TT: Uhh. 

TT: Uh. Yeah. Ok. 

TT: That’s not gonna happen. 

TG: omg y not tho 

TG: going 2 a gay bar or something is the best that could happen 2 u rn 

TG: picture this 

TG: hot sweaty men dancing on you 

TG: a devastsatingly handsum stranger buying u a drink 

TG: u do the shitnasty and maybe even post a few pics 2 instragram 

TG: *instagram 

TG: itll make jake MAD jealous to see whats hes been missing since he want all the bodyguard on ur ass 

TT: I’m torn between galled and proud you picked up the term “shitnasty”. Galled because it was probably Dave who told you. 

TT: Proud because you’re finally embracing the Radical side of your family tree. Capitalized and underlined for emphasis. 

TT: Also: pics? 

TG: yeha 

TG: i wouldnt mind some myself u kno 

TG: ;) WONK 

TT: Now I know what you’re getting out of this equation. 

TG: call it tax 4 me coming up w/ such an awesome idea 

TG: srsly im sure u would enjoy it once u got used 2 the concept of actually 

TG: GASP 

TG: going outside 

TG: besides i just know ur not the hermit u always pretend 2 be 

TT: Besides the fact that this could very fast turn into a clusterfuck of epic proportions if someone realizes I am my Bro’s brother, 

TT: As in The Dave Strider’s brother, 

TT: I’m barely legal. No one would serve me a drink in a gay bar. 

TG: oh poo dave 

TG: hed probs drive u 2 ur date with a hot unknown gay dude personally if it meant making u happy 

TG: you got the cool parent out of the equation 

TG: if ud tell him this plan hed most likely pop a bottle of champers 

TG: my kids all grown up sniff sniff 

TG: going 2 a real adult date 

TG: theyre gonna do it in tha butt 

TT: Yeah, the evidence that he would do just that is as equivocal as it is frightening. 

TG: dont get smart w/ me young’uns 

TG: and about that drinking problem 

TG: *problem 

TG: wait 

TT: You sure we shouldn’t talk about a wholly different drinking problem? 

TT: It’s like 6pm at yours. 

TG: dirk 

TT: Alright, my mouth is firmly shut, zip-tied and locked. 

TT: I’m even doing the whole shtick where I pretend to throw the key away. 

TT: But you know. I’m here. 

TT: And shit. 

TG: and shit is exactly what im talking about sighhh 

TG: it was much funner when we talked about the possibility of u getting your nasty on w/an older handsome stranger 

TG: look u dont have 2 do it if ur not comfortable w/ it i was just thinking that maybe itd be a good way for u to move this trainwreck u so aptly called it along 

TG: nothing like a GOOD ROUND OF FRISKY BEESWAX 2 drip drop any unwanted feelings u might still harbour right 

TG: right 

TG: dirk u gotta work w/ me here 

TG: r u still here 

TT: Yeah. I’m here. 

TG: so what do u say 

TT: I’ll think about it, I guess. 

TT: No promises though. 

TG: awesome!! 

TG: wait i gotta stop letting janey influence me 

TG: i mean 

TG: radical

TT: Somewhere under clouds of tobacco smoke and endless pages of annotations, Dave just shed a single tear of pride 

TG: lmao 

TG: anyways i gotta dash now moms home and were having wizard night 2night 

TT: Isn’t every night wizard night with the two of you? 

TT: If you had a calendar, every single square would be meticulously blanked out by the phrase that dominates your life. 

TT: The idiom of interest. The tag of transfixation. The expression of exaltedness. The remark of rapture. 

TT: Gay magic. 

TG: u hit the nail right on the head 

TG: on the wizard hatted head ;) 

TG: moms calling gotta run 

TT: Have fun. And, uh. 

TT: Thanks. 

TT: Both for the moral support and the advice. 

TG: anytime 4 my favourite best cousin brother gay friend 

**\--**

\--  tipsyGnostalgic [TG]  stopped pestering timaeusTestified [TT]  \-- 

 

TT: I’m the only one you know who ticks all those boxes, you goof. 

\-- timaeusTestified [TT]  stopped pestering tipsyGnostalgic [TG]  \-- 

###### 

Despite what you promised Roxy, for a good while you don’t think about it.

But then you do.

You do.

You do.

You do.


	2. woke up on the wrong side of reality.

**nascence.**

or: _and all we do is drive / sugar how’d you get so[fly](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRHN8jWpJrQ)_

 

It comes back to you, as most wholly crooked ideas do, when you are in the presence of exactly the same person you’d likely want to avoid when entertaining thoughts whose depravity range about a six point five on the Kinsey scale and a solid eleven on the Richter magnitude one.

That is to say, it comes to you when the two of you are crammed together in a car, two tonnes of steel and wires the only barrier between you and freedom.

Well, between you and the interstate, that is.

 

Of course your brain would never so much as bring this idea to your attention in a natural way. No, your hippocampus has always been of the firm conviction that it’s his way or the highway.

 

Apparently that applies to those brain areas parsing emotion as well ( _Amygdala_ , Hal writes, neatly dotted and singular in its causticness,) because the way you feel about Dave’s chuckle upon putting forward above idiom as a possible endless joke in his next monstrosity has nothing, zilch, nada to do with brotherly companionship.

It’s about as affiliated with platonic bonding as a tomato is affiliated with a vegetable.

Sure, it might look like it on the first glance, but you’ve read too much Tolkien to not know that line about glitter and gold.

 

On the other hand, Roxy would be delighted.

You have some virtual catgold on your hands. This pyrite is spilling out of your fingers like you’re trying to catch sand in free fall. Ain’t no stopping it now.  
Somewhere at Mr. 305 Inc. in Miami, Pitbull and Kelly Clarkson just exchanged a violent high five, the likes of which oughta be audible all over the East Coast.

 

Regardless of that, of course the thought slams into you when you and your brother are bantering over the importance of using multiple filters on top of each other whenever posting a picture on social media (you plead the case that four should be enough to distort his face into virtual unrecognizability, he is adamant that no less than six should suffice). You should count your graces, until Dave had arbitrarily switched the topic to lazy Instagram editing, you had been the sole audience of a thirty-five minute rant regarding Hollywood’s elitist standards for dramedies.

 

He claims it’s a disaster of the grossest extent that the qualification for the Tony’s are “about as wide as M. Night Shyamalan’s budget when it comes to anthropomorphic semi-beasts fucking trees for any no name hipster with a supposed deep and meaningful message but about as tight as dude’s asshole when it comes to actual believable storylines for the type of hot steaming garbage I crank out with unrelentless brute force.”

 

Rose claims it’s because he hasn’t been nominated in the category of “Best Dramedy” for the now third time in a row.

After witnessing that magic word babble trick where he essentially pulls adverb after clause out of his mouth in order to drown you in verbiage, you are inclined to believe her.

Dave uses that trick often, especially on people he neither wishes to impress nor wishes to continue a conversation with. It’s very effective in its repellence of both paparazzi and stalkers. Even you find yourself getting vaguely uncomfortable when he feeds you spoonful after spoonful of senseless logorrhoea until the point of bursting.

 

You also – though this only in a lazy, vaguely amused way – believe Rose’s suspicion that perhaps you inherited your tendency for vaguely related tangents from him.

Shocker.

Though at least your tangential lines of coversation are peripherally touching the Mother Earth of the original topic, his have long since left the orbit of everything that might possibly connect it back to what he was trying to say.

 

Wait, what _were_ _you_ trying to say?

 

For a moment, the wind howling through the window (which you rolled down despite Dave’s protests about his hair and getting enough protein in his diet to not necessitate some extra bugs down his oesophagus) and the glint of his shades in your peripheral vision capture you in the here and now, stuck in time like a polaroid before the world resumes turning and you return to reality.

 

After a moment of consideration you find that your choice of verb usage might have been inappropriate, even in your thoughts.

The idea of bursting out with a cheerful, if vague _I’m going to fuck a stranger in a club_ with only the Pacific coast and Dave as your witness is in equal terms hilarious, if only for the look on your brother’s face, and nauseating. The latter you neither elaborate on nor engage with further than a brief cursory glance over the whole glaringly incestual box of issues you have taken up.

 

It’s a particular package you’ve stuffed away so far in the crevices of your mind that every time it pops up, you surprise yourself.

Not.

Because you might be a good liar when it comes to _literally everyone else except yourself_ , but when it comes to any form of your own brain, you are incapable of fooling yourself.

 

That box is about as hidden as lovely, pale-skinned Jane, who to her own despair has finally realized you have outgrown her by a solid five inches, in a group of tanned, athletic behemoths.

And akin to that situation, you realize you can neither blame the box nor its plain sightedness.

It’d be so easy to subjectify this chest, to make it into your Pandora’s box and blame every monster, every nightmare or wet dream that emerges from it on itself, but you are the master of your own destruction and you have orchestrated it so skilfully that there is truly no doubt as to who is pulling the strings behind the scenes here.

It does not reassure you.

 

You count three things you can hear ( _radio, tires, wind_ ), four things you can touch ( _car seat, window, shiftstick, jeans_ ) and one thing you can’t ( _dave, dave, dave, dave_ ).

 

By the time your breath has settled enough to focus on your brother’s inane chattering again, you have left the sandy coastlines with its small houses painted in pastel colours behind.

 

Dave always insists on taking the 101 out of Los Angeles right up to San José despite the fact that it’s smaller, crowded and has a speed limit which causes you to bite your fist in suppressed agony even on the _good_ days.

 

He says it’s the scenic view, but this drive has led you to the exact same villages every year two or three times for longer than you can imagine and every time you are astonished by how _ugly_ they are.

The pale green/yellow/pink paint jobs of the houses closer to the highway is smudged with dirt at the base, window shutters painted an ugly dark green and mostly hanging crookedly from the hinges. You think it’s all kinds of ugly. Dave thinks it’s _artistic_ , which is code for either wanting to rile you up or for the fact that he has really no taste at all.

Your case in point is the gaudy, flimsy Dodgers jersey he is currently wearing which proves to be the last nail in the coffin.

Here lies the assumption that once upon a time Dave Strider had something of an inkling of a fashion sense. Rest in deuces.

 

It’s about as old as you are, but the cheap blue and red print on white polyester has proven to be astoundingly resistant to any and all attempts you made to destroy it. That, or he simply has an endless wardrobe of them and pulls another one out every time you put them into the heat dryer and shrink them to Lil Cal’s size. Junior would have quite an assembly of those if they didn’t have the tendency of disappearing whenever you try to triumphantly present one of those mishaps in laundry adventures to your brother.

It’s a hopeless battle. Or, to quote one of Sweet Bro’s magnificent lines that brings a tear to your eye every time you think of Stiller’s somewhat awkwardly proportioned, yet movingly gaunt chin structure: “yeth it HASS persist”.

God, what a masterpiece.

 

Still

Fucker doesn’t even _like_ baseball.

 

One definite point in his favour (you’re not going to lie, there was a point in your life when you had definitely compiled a somewhat detailed spreadsheet regarding advantages and disadvantages of living with him before Rose found it and promptly delivered the most uncomfortable half-hour lecture you ever had the displeasure of sitting through) is that on those trips he is prone to gratuitous gabbing.

 

They coincide mostly with periods in his work that consist of either just having wrapped a script up and handed the whole flaming mess with grateful thanks and a warning to only handle with iron prongs and some fireproof gloves to a hapless editor drone or two _or_ \- which is vastly preferable in your opinion – the post-premiere of another one of his so-called junkyard monstrosities.

 

After those, you know him well enough, he is keyed up enough to ignore your protests, bundle you, four suitcases (one for you, two for his clothes and one for his neverending array of hair products, seriously, why won’t no one believe you that they _multiply_ ) and your primary antagonism into the Tesla and take off for the house he and Rose co-own in Washington.

 

You personally have little to no idea what’s so special about a nondescript two-bedroom condo somewhere in Maple Valley’s suburbia, but neither of them will give either you or Roxy a straight answer no matter what tactic you employ.

 

Therefore you’ve given up on perusing that particular line of question and spend most of your time either getting the absolute _shit_ kicked out of you by Roxy in Mario Kart or letting Rose teach you how to poker. You got the _face down, hands down_ , she assures you every time with the kind of wicked smirk that really just causes you to question whether she just means to make that pun or whether she’s really making fun of you.

 

“Hey now,” he interrupts your line of thought, the drawl he never seems to shred and you’re never able to place, smoothing out his consonants and adding a phonetic [aː] to any and all of his vowels.

“If your ass is falling asleep on me, I’ll never let you live it down. You’re gonna roll up to the shared Strider and Lalonde Casa El Feriado absolutely _covered_ in dick sharpie. There’s not going to be one inch of your pasty ass skin-“

 

“Which is rich, because last time I checked the mirror, mirror on the wall, you were still the fairest of them all, Queen Grimhilde,” you interrupt, though not loud enough to actually cease his wordflow.

 

“ _Not going to be one inch of your pasty ass skin_ not covered in absolutely filthy sketches. I’m talking PG-13 here. The dicks might even feature a foreskin.”

 

“Check yourself, these dicks are clearly underage. There’s no hair anywhere.”

 

“ _Covered_ in pubes,” Dave seamlessly corrects himself, taking one hand off the steering wheel to scratch the side of his nose. Whilst genetics has blessed him in every other aspect except perhaps the few crow’s feet beginning to show just where the soft skin next to his eye stretches tautly over his cheekbone, he definitely inherited your father’s beaked nose. You, however, are sitting pretty in the city with the pert little upturn of your mother and are definitely not above showing said condescension.

“We’re talking about regular Grizzlies here. Might even feature a Yeti or two.”

 

“Eat your heart out, Scribblenaut.”

 

And for a few moments you’re comfortable again, it’s _daveanddirkanddirkanddave_ against the world, against the ocean crashing on the shore, waves lapping at the doorsteps of those tiny, ugly houses.

Maybe their owners loved those houses once.

Maybe they loved them so much that they would not give them up despite the fact that the ceilings are crumbling and the hinges are rusty from the wear and tear of salt and sand.

It’s a strange thing, loving something that can never be sustained. Loving something that will fall apart eventually. Jade, ever in touch with her heritage, told you once they call it _onsra_ in Boro: a love that cannot, must not last.

 

Maybe that is why you love Dave.

 

 

 

**anagnorisis.**

or: _find me at sea / and tell me why you / never loved[me](http://5secondsofsirenslover.tumblr.com/post/146129750618/i-just-love-this-song-so-muchnew-album-is)_

 

Let’s be honest here.

 

There is no fixed point in time when you fall in love with your brother.

 

This is generally not how it goes. People do not wake up one Sunday morning, look out of the window and are suddenly starstruck, moonse[t](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75kJb_aAvKY), clockstoppe[d](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CO5IN60Nt9E) by the sudden realization that they harbour someone else inside their body and soul. They do not look up from their coffee and their eyes widen in an abrupt epiphany at this, this _intruder_.

No sheets are tossed aside.

No cups are shattered on the ground.

There is no _then and now_ in love.

 

Instead, you fall in love like everyone else does. Gradually and over a very long period of time.

 

 **Consider** : Maybe it’s the way he woke you up when it was time for school, toothbrush still in his mouth and one half of his face wrinkled because he tends to curl up on one side, usually his left, when he sleeps, reduce his size, take up less space.

It’s one of the touches from the life he does not talk about, the life you do not dream about that he cannot seem to shake. It stays with him like a bad smell, clings to him like a limpet. It’s adding up along with all the other small things you notice more and more every year.

Dave steals ketchup packets from every Golden Arches under the sun.

Fills up his glass only halfway.

Uses jars and margarine containers as Tupperware.

With every cycle around the sun you feel as if you are a tree, growing and expanding, earning age rings while Dave slowly grows more and more transparent.

 

It’s frightful, the possibility of one day looking _through_ him, to acutely feel the loss of this shroud of mystery that’s always surrounded him.

Of course, it’s just as likely as the chance of falling in love like falling down stairs (even in the no-nonsense honesty you’ll allow yourself occasionally there will always be space and time for a well-concealed SBaHJ joke), but unsurprisingly enough, it does not alleviate this fear in the slightest.

 

When you were sixteen you started reading Murakami.

 

_(“Only Men Without Women can comprehend how painful, how heartbreaking, it is to become one. You lose that wonderful west wind. The bottom of the sea, with the ammonites and coelacanths.”)_

 

Everything about it confused you until nothing did anymore, but you are not afraid of losing the wind, you are afraid of losing the opacity it brings.

 

 **Consider** : Maybe it’s the way he wakes you now when it’s four in the morning and you swim to the surface of your dreams, thoughts half-fuzzied with the ichor of sleep and the only noise in the apartment the steady pace of his feet when he continues his endless rounds, from window to window to door. It’s sixteen steps and you count, count, count.

 

In ninth grade, when you were riddled by both acne and puberty, Roxy (spurred by either the romance parts in Rose’s novels or an inexplicable crush on that little shithead tripping her up in gym class) once asked you what you’d thought true love felt like and with some tiny, malicious part of your brain, you wish you’d laughed at her.

Instead you had both metaphorically and quite literally shrugged your rounded shoulders and told her that it

 

 

TT: Probably feels like a very angry cupid punching you in the face.

 

TT: One moment you’re just vaguely considering respective person as a possible ally to your mission to either become the sickest catburglar between here and that one shitty Halle Berry movie or world’s most renounced ventriloquist.

 

TT: Next thing you know, you wanna get with that more than the prime time spots on ABC and you’re probably pumped up and real fucking mad about it.

 

TT: The damage is colossal. Irrefutable and irreparable. Someone hit that poor clean up crew with about a billion boondollars if we’re calculating off the top of our heads.

 

TT: Because there might possibly be some… catlateral damage.

 

 

Later, you widely regarded that as not only bad advice, but possibly a bad move on your part. King to E8. Checkmate.

 

Thing is, though you’d never tarnish your reputation by actually conceding the falsehood of your statement: it’s really, really _wrong_.

 

Yeah, no one gets angry in love, even though some Saturday nights, when the only profile of your brother you get to see is the blurred one a camera catches of him schmoozing up to some bigwig at the afterparty it everything continues to add up, tiny little mountains of long division, you _think they should_.

Why does no one protest this love?

Why does no one stand up and say _I did not want you in my heart / why are you here / what are you doing / get out of my mind_?

Your love should be a revolution, but instead it is as calm as the endless sea you sometimes dream of, edge between sky and water so indistinguishable that it’s nothing but blue dew.

Your love should be a wildfire, but instead he wakes you up right after executing a flawless three-point turn and parallel-parking the car outside the house in Maple Valley.

 

He’s got his shades pushed onto his head and you can see every little birthmark and the deep brown spots in his irises, the red miles seemingly endless in his sclera.

Dave smiles at you and you think _there you are_ with such fierce affection that it chokes you inside out.

 

Let’s be honest here.

As honest as you’ll allow yourself to be.

 

Your love should be red.

But you are blue, blue, blue.

 

 

 

**hamartia.**

or: _talkin’, talkin’, talkin’ talk / baby let’s just knock it[off](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LBTdJHkAr5A)_

 

tipsyGnostalgic [TG]  at 14:01 opened memo on board OPERATION PENETRATION

TG: lets get this show on tha road

TG: to show how srs i am bout any of this ive even abstained from getting sloshed @ an ungodly hour of the day

TG: by which i mean an hour at which i woulda been normally waste deep into moms liquor cabinet

TG: *waist

TG: OR IS IT

timaeusTestified [TT] responded to memo at 14:03.

TT: Roxy, this is incessantly unnecessary.

TT: Similar adverb and adjective repeated for emphasis. We are literally two doors and one flight of stairs apart from each other, you can come talk to me.

TT: Why didn’t you just pester me in the first place?

gutsyGumshoe [GG]  responded to memo at 14:07. 

GG: What in the world is going on here?

TT: Oh, hell no.

TG: oh hell YESSS

TG: we are on a mission

TG: wait lemme capitalize

TG: a MISSION

GG: That is not so much as capitalization as it is caps lock. :B

TG: omfg u spoilsport

TT: I reject every step of this.

GG: Whatever are we on a mission for, then?

TT: Nothing.

TG: a holy crusade to get battle scarred conquistador lil d stride here to make his aluas proud

TG: *alias

TG: d strider more like DICK RIDER amirite

GG: …

TT: You are completely and utterly soused, sober my ass.

TG: why do u always focus on that

TG: its like you dont even WANT me to have fun

TT: “Having fun” is one thing, having “””fun””” via proxy of trying to get me to fulfil your MLM quota is another.

TT: Read some fanfiction of CotL, I ain’t your pet project for when you’re feeling lonely.

TG: …

GG: …

TG: dirk :(

GG: I feel like that should be a conversation the two of you ought to be having alone.

TT: Fuck.

TT: I’m sorry, Jane. I certainly didn’t want you to get engulfed by this maelstrom of a conversation killer.

GG: Oh, come on.

GG: This has been long overdue for the two of you! Dirk, I get you are sad and still caught up on everything that happened last year. I really do. But it’s like you spent the last nine months in complete limbo!

GG: I’m not telling you to get over it because what happened was just horrible on all fronts. But you need to at least stop isolating yourself from everyone that cares about you. You can’t stay like this forever! It isn’t healthy!

TT:

GG: And YOU.

TG: janey look

GG: No, no “Janey look” or “I’m sorry, Jane”. I don’t know what’s happened that drove you to thinking getting utterly _plastered_ by three in the afternoon every weekday and before noon on the weekend and I _wish_ to everything I know I could help you.

GG: But you block every attempt at help and continue to romanticize a lifestyle of constant substant abuse while criticizing Dirk for the very same fundamental mindset you yourself are a part of!

GG: I am SICK AND TIRED of both of you cocooning yourself away and rejecting every notion that things could get better.

GG: Until you two get your heads out of your asses, I won’t be a part of this.

GG: Message me when you figured out a way to do so.

gutsyGumshoe [GG] has left the memo [14:18]

TG: …

TT: …

TG: … we kinda deserved that 1 dindt we

TT: Yeah. Kind of did.

 

 

**peripeteia.**

or: _she said it's all about sex with you (it's not all about sex) / i just wanna lay next to[you](https://youtu.be/aUO4srQcVLc) (when you bring me to bed)_

 

Of course you go, in the end.

You’ll always go as long as Roxy asks you, the bones of her slender, almost skeletal fingers pressing into your palm as she leads you towards the nearest bus station.

True to form, you have no idea where you are headed, but you had her promise on Frigglish, her copy of _Colonel Sassacre's Daunting Text of Magical Frivolity and Practical Japery_ and on Rose’s new manuscript (in that specific order) that she would get the two of you to a club you’d actually get admitted to and – more importantly – get you back out again.

 

Back out again and home before either of your respective parental units notices that you are not engaging in the family friendly version of a pool party, barbecue and stargazing you had excused yourselves from the breakfast table with.

 

Not that there’d be an actual semblance of true breakfast anywhere to be found. Nary a shred of the table had been free, to begin with, mostly due to Rose’s self-initiated burial behind an avalanche of bookmarked, edited and crumpled pages.

It had been a pile of parchments. A stack of stationary. A chunk of Complacency.

True to form, the ink had been purple and you are fairly sure some of the runes you spotted on the draft pages for the illustrations might be drawn with _blood_.

Whilst Roxy had told you that she might be busy correcting her draft notes for what she’d called “the eleventh thousandth fucking time, just because she’s in an ongoing war with her editor about the pertinence of the oxford comma”, you hadn’t realized just _how_ busy she might get.

In correlation to that, her involvement in your morning had mostly consisted of humming a few times and at the same time striking through whole paragraphs with a ferocity which caused half of the table to wobble, be it out of fear or through the force of her movement.  
You can relate, to be honest.

 

But Rose’s disinterest in your subsequent whereabouts has proven actually beneficial for your plans. Well, Roxy’s plans.

In her mental and spiritual absence, the role of head of household has – unsuccessfully, you might add – been delegated to Dave. Not that he’s exactly proven himself to be a shining example on either the breakfast or the parental front, you recall with something that could almost, almost be described as _sourness_.

It’s really no wonder why he lets Rose take precedence every time the two of them meet (right after they share one of those menthol cigarettes he keeps in his left back pocket and disabled the dishwasher for two weeks after you snuck some at age fourteen to try and teach you something about indentured servitude). Dave is _terrible_ at making any decisions that involve both Roxy and you.

 

Sure, the success of your plan largely hinges on your ability to sneak in and out undetected (which, if Rose is still up you’ll be calling a hard no on, the woman has ears like a _bat_ ), but it strikes you, true to form, as an astounding lapse in fraternal vigilance.

You are decidedly _not_ brooding over the fact that the alibi you had so carefully laid out, almost motherly cultivated had been handwaved within negative two point five seconds after he told you in an almost persuasive imitation of that one soccer mom at middle school whose children had a 6pm curfew to _have fun and not do drugs_.

You’d almost believe him, were it not for that slanted, sly look Rose had shot him and the slow, burning curl of his lip in return.

 

It’s strange, not having Dave all to yourself. Back at home, you are the one who shares all his jokes, who mocks his addiction to terrible Victorian-era serials about governesses falling in love with their handsome, brooding employer (coincidentally the wife prime has either been put on a train out to nowheresville or retconned into being long dead) and debates the values and merits of Cheerios versus Lucky Charms (the latter being of course the long time winner because _marshmallows, motherfucker_ ).

But throughout all this, through being kept in the loop of what is possibly Dave’s greatest inside joke – _himself_ – you forget very easily that there is one person who knows Dave better than you do.

Or at least presumes to.

You might begrudgingly admit Rose and him have been through the thick together. Perhaps even through the seemingly impenetrable together if you’re continuing that metaphor.

The fact that you’re not brooding doesn’t mean it doesn’t sting to see Dave share seemingly meaningless tidbits of conversation with her that seem pointless to you and Roxy but if in on the joke

would probably have you on the floor holding your ribs in prolonged agony from laughing too hard.

Laughgony? God, you really might be a smidge too invested in their relationship.

Still, it remains: _you are not brooding_.

 

“Stop brooding,” Roxy tells you decidedly, studying the bus timetable with an intensity she usually reserves for particularly obstinate statistic problems, her C++ pet project or when she’s figuring out how she can best swipe that 900$ bottle of champagne.

(Turns out even someone as cloudcuckoolandish as Dave misses the prominent star of his collection of gifts from people who clearly want to see him end up as an alcoholic. That is what you had based your defense on. Rose had been a merciless prosecution, though. All she had missed to a regular Franziska von Karma was the gratuitous German and the cracking of a whip. You’d never seen Roxy so cowed.)

 

You refuse to engage in the typical battle of wits the two of you have been locked in ever since you were old enough to both speak and insult each other. Which, now that you think about it, were pretty much at the same time you were old enough to speak. Granted, back then it was more along the lines of _no i’m not/yes you are/no/yes/no/yes/mom_.

 

“I’m not sulking.”

 

“Yes, you are.”

 

Maybe some things really never change.

 

From the looks of it, Roxy’s had the exact same thought. The way she smiles, one half of her mouth tugged to the side slightly, the other edge curled in an almost perfect _C_ is so much like Dave, you sometimes really have your doubts about the alleged disappearance of her biological father.

 

She probably does too, judging by how she sometimes stops and gives Dave a certain look, enough to make even his ginormous mouth stop for a second.

And that is not even meant to be a gross overstatement of the sort you base your (trustfund, rich kid, spoiled shit) livelihood on, dude’s like Kirby in _Super Smash Brother’s Brawl_.

 

Once he opens up, there’s really nothing that won’t be sucked up or come out.

 

… on the other hand, maybe you have successfully taken that metaphor Too Far.

You and that metaphor went on a roadtrip because you thought you were better friends, maybe even called yourself _Team Better Friends_ ironically, but realized with the kind of resigned, objective neutrality that stings more than actual emotion because it means you, Peter Pan, child eternal have _finally grown up_ that yeah, you ain’t the kind of friends you used to be any more.

Probably had a falling out somewhere between Alabama and Arkansas, coming to a head in some shitty second-grade motel the two of you took for the irony of it where you sat down on the double bed which you were stupid enough to book and told ~~him~~ it _you love her, you need her and I will never be her_.

The two of you likely turned around on the second leg of your journey only to drop the ball and never, ever take it up again.

That metaphor wants nothing to do with you anymore.

It’s blocked you on Facebook and unfollowed you on Twitter and isn’t taking your calls anymore, no matter how many pleading voicemails you leave with it.

 

You stop leaving voicemails after a while.

 

As a last-ditch attempt to be a gracious loser, you leave the metaphor, or mostly your thoughts about it, at the bus stop to follows its own dreams and goals like you left it at the airport to go back to whatever jungle island it came from and instead jam yourself into a tiny loveseat at the back of the bus with Roxy. Her elbows are digging into your ribcage like they’re trying to make a new home there and one of her knees is on top of your shin, but you’ve always been as close, if not closer than siblings.

She is, excluding Dave, of course, one of the only people whose touch you can stand these days.

 

The ride into the city takes the better part of an hour and while you’re talking in the beginning, the two of you slowly quiet, turning your head to the window where dawn is slowly beginning to sink down over the city. It’s painting the bright red cinder rooftops an ugly ochre which reminds you of the tiny, shabby houses by the sea along the Pacific coastline and streaks the streets in grey and black.

It’s nothing at all like those unloved, rundown carcasses, but in this late July haze everything looks the same. Autumn equinox is coming up and you know the stories Rose told you when both you and Roxy were smaller and more malleable, willing to listen to bedtime stories about fairies and gnomes, fae and foxes.

Nowadays the only bedtime story Roxy reads is the dirty little stories she finds God knows where on the internet.

Nowadays the only lullaby you get is Dave’s muffled arguing in the next room over when an editor is being particularly obstinate again.

 

Sometimes, though, sometimes when it’s neither a pagan holiday nor the moon’s fullness holds any relevance, he still opens your door and you still pretend to sleep every time.

You are fairly sure he has seen through that thin veneer of pseudo snoozing you cultivate from the very first time you had faked slumber with an open book still on your chest, but it doesn’t keep him from coming in anyways.

Mostly he just takes whatever book, gadget or electronic device you had been juggling out of your hand and puts it onto the nightstand. Those times he’ll leave and return with a glass of water, a remembrance from your childhood days when you’d wake up in the middle of the night, throat parched in fear from the strange, saturated dreams you’d had.

If you’re very lucky, he tugs the blanket a bit higher in a formidable, yet ironic parody of Jane’s father.

The guy had tucked _you_ in the one time when you were sleeping over at her house and you had only met him for the first time that afternoon.

Once, although in retrospect you had not been sure whether that was a particularly adroit trick of your sleeping mind, he’d brushed your fringe back, fingers (calloused from constant typing and carrying all those goddamn Academy Awards around) brushing lightly against the soft skin of your forehead.

 

Except that time, he never touches you.

He rarely does anymore, these days.

 

The city seems to be just as starved for anything, _everything_ as you are, the only illumination the one it creates for itself, neon bulbs and fairy light strings a crass oxymoron to the darkened alleys far off the city center.

 

You could say something about the Good, the Bad and the Evil, but after Dave’s three-year-long copyrighting feud with _Fall Out Boy_ you don’t want to be accused the same thing by their lesser cousin _Panic! At The Disco_.

 

Begrudgingly, you admit to Roxy’s nose for sniffing out clubs that are just far enough from the centre to make sure it isn’t crowded with too many people to recognize you, the flight risk with a fear of falling, but still checks off the main prerequisite that got you to agree to this tree, meaning _hella fucking gay_.

No, seriously.

You can see two dudes making out against the wall right next to the bouncer, who is appropriately muscled, bald and absolutely fucking unbothered by what seems to be a skip to third base right away less than five feet next to him.

There’s a lot of tongue involved.

Jesus.

Yeah, there’s a _lot_ of tongue involved.

 

Your steps slow down involuntarily as you approach whatever Sodom and Gomorrha level of depravity calls itself _“Members Only”_ , which despite the sinking feeling in your stomach you cannot help but appreciate for its witticism.

 

Roxy turns around and her eyes are so bright in the fading light it hurts.

You know she wants to say _alright?_ and _I’m sorry_ and you want to say _I don’t think it is_ and _I am too, more than you’ll ever know_ , but instead you just stand there looking at each other for a few seconds before the both of you remember with a visible start that could be featured on one of WatchMojo.com’s _Top 10 Cats Being Caught At Something They Shouldn’t Be Doing_ that this is neither a Nicholas Sparks movie nor a John Green book and she steps closer to hook her arm in yours.

 

“Alright, you loser, it’s time for Moxy with Roxy,” she declares, smiling at the slightly more impressed bouncer in what Dave calls her 1000-megawatt _My Little Superstar_ smile. Where she got those faked I.D.’s you don’t particularly want to know, but they’re impressive enough for the man to step aside and grant you entrance to a narrow hallway behind the door, painted in red and pink colours.

You don’t say it out loud, but it…

Okay, you say it out loud.

 

“This looks like someone decided the best way to get someone comfortable with entering a gay club would be to make the entrance a fucking _vagina_.”

Roxy snorts so loud she about blows your left eardrum out. Somewhere ahead of you, a skinny dude with an oversized red jumper turns around and gives you an incredulous stare before his companion tugs him away.

 

“Maybe they were trying to have a back-to-the-womb experience?”

 

“Yeah, because nothing makes me feel more secure about my sexuality than crawling back up someone’s cooch,” you reply, this time awarded more than just one person looking at you like you’re RuPaul and just told them to sashay away (Dave watches that show with religious fervour and despite what he tells you, you _know_ he cries every Monday when _OK! Magazine_ does a big spread about the voted off drag queen).

“That whole Iocasta and Oedipus routine _really_ does it for me in the ‘up and raring to go suck some wieners’ department.”

 

Roxy does that little snort of hers that is her real-life equivalent of

omfg dork

*dirk

 

And away you go, into the night.

 

Or rather, into the astoundingly roomy dancehall meets grunge apocalypse aesthetic _Members Only_ pulls off surprisingly well.

To your surprise – and probably Roxy’s relief – there is a whole number of females there, either watching the grinding people on the dancefloor with something between covert lust and overt benevolence.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot more guys.

 _Hot_ guys.

Oh, and a number not-so-hot ones as well.

The stereotype about all gay people being fucking ripped and between twenty and a cool thirty-five is proven blatantly untrue by the amount of fourty-plus bear-like hulking giants and _sixty-plus geezers, fucking ew_ you are seeing.

Either way, they’re everywhere.

It’s like Ellen DeGeneres walked in like a fairy godmother in fairly godfather-y attire and brought the party with her. The party is here to stay. It’s gonna build a house and have a healthy relationship with its partner and no traces of unwarranted co-dependency or eventual growing enervation of said reliance to be found. They’re gonna go to Florence in the Winter and to Norway in the summer and hold each other’s hands while watching the sky somewhere in the south of Nantes. Bitter? You aren’t bitter. You’re so happy for this party you could burst.

 

“It’s a gayvasion,” you whisper towards the general vicinity of Roxy’s ear. Or her nose. It’s hard to see in the dark.

“Put your fucking hands up. And then down again. And then up again. Because they really want you to dance and have a good time.”

 

You rate her response of “ _Get your head in the gayme, you noob_ ,” at about eight point five out of ten possible hats.

 

You make like Troy Bolton (although you realize you are more Ryan Evans in this scenario) and your way towards the bar, though not before trading off a few lines with Roxy. They do not bear repeating but involve liberal use of the terms _gaygent_ and _lesbionage_. Whoever gave you permission to act like an adult needs their eyes evaluated.

 

The wonderful thing about adult clubs is that mostly the bartender depends on the bouncers having already checked your I.D. and only gives it a cursory glance before asking you for your order in the type of bored voice that makes you think he’s either on some quality grade MDMA shit or has been working here ever since Versace brought paisley back in the 1980s.

By the age of him, you’d suspect the latter.

 

You order a Long Island Ice Tea, because it’s a) the kind of drink you’d think someone like you would order at those kind of clubs and b) because the faster you get sloshed, the faster you can pretend someone gave you a handjob in one of the cloakrooms and you can get out of here. From across the dancefloor you can see Roxy shooting you a glance every now and then before continuing her conversation with what seems to be like… a girl? A very small man in a green suit? You honestly don’t know and don’t care.

When the bartender turns his back, you stick your tongue out at her and wriggle it in between the V-shape of your index and middle finger.

She mimes throwing up.

 

From beside you, you can hear a snort, audible enough to know it’s directed at your personage and turn around with a mixture of awkward chargrin and defiance, because you’re _allowed to show your tongue at a fucking gay bar, what are you, the Gay Police Association Washington?_

 

The man who has sidled up next to you is tall enough that even Dave’s quite impressive height would not live up to him. He’s wearing a white shirt with a popped collar, tight enough that you can see his deltoids bulging at the short sleeves, curving right into a smooth line of where his biceps meets brachialis, and a snapback with the blue-white-red bull of the Houston Texans that shades his brow.

You can’t see his eyes from here, but you just bet they would be filled with the hubris his age and admittedly real rad looks bring with it, not to mention the well-intentioned, yet still patronizing superciliousness.

God, you hate that dude already.

 

You are ready to defend your honour, to verbally throatpunch him in a Bruce Lee-style _One Inch Takedown_ maneuver if he as so much breathes in your direction, but to your annoyance, he does not spare you even a single glance. He’s the type of guy you’d expect has a secret handshake with the bartender and doesn’t even have to say a word before Joe (you imagine that the MDMA guy to be a Joe, he sure looks like one) would mix him something dangerous, but also fruity with a lot of absinthe, some cream and a death wish you could fuel a heavy metal band with.

The album would probably feature a skeleton jamming out some _sick_ riffs on guitar, a full moon in the background, possible with a wolf or two poised as a howling silhouette and blue flames of some kind.

 

Instead he just orders a Whiskey Sour with the kind of accent that reminds you of the rare tapes existing of Dave’s earlier days as a movie director, the same slicked off intonation and curved pronounciation, and takes his leave.

You’re left with a vague sense of disappointment, yet also intrigued as to what about _Members Only_ beckons someone who looks like he’s diving his time between fending off lot lizards at truck stops and outrunning the younger men next to him on the treadmill at his local gym with the kind of easy grace that’d suit a track and field star more than it suits his broad linebacker physique.

 

And for all that is sweet and hella in the world (somewhere your brother just wiped away an unexpected tear of surprised broternal pride away at your continued willingness to merchandise his sweet loot for him) what is it with you, good-looking older men and fucking _football team accessories_?

 

Before you can spend too much time about your unfortunate proclivity for the kind of sportswear that doesn’t really accentuate someone’s, uh, anatomical blessings (in other words, every piece of apparel that _does not involve the word booty shorts in or around it_ ), you are rudely interrupted by the bartender sliding something over small and violently green over to you.

It’s a small glass, possibly filled with a shot, possibly filled with neon, liquid electricity.

 

“I didn’t order that,” you tell the bartender, aware of how stupid and cliché you are sounding right now but you aren’t too much into the idea of ingesting straight up hydroxybutyrate and waking up with one to three of your organs missing.

Reminds you of the time Dave participated in that celebrity campaign telling young women to never accept drinks from strangers and when he came home one evening shortly thereafter, sat you down and straight-facedly tried to tell you to never take advantage of a girl, drunk or not.

It ended with you telling him _I’m gay, you absolute shitsicle_ , after which he paused for a second and then told you the same applied to guys as well.

And that’s the story of how you came out to Dave.

All things considered, it could’ve gone a lot worse.

 

The bartender heaves the kind of put-upon sigh that makes you suspect he deals with this question about every metric five flashseconds and points one astoundingly steady thumb toward the other end of the bar.

“It’s a present,” he recites. You wonder how much he wants to quit his job and work at a horror house every Valentine’s Day. Worse, how much pinker the hallway walls get on Valentine’s Day.

“From dude down there.”

 

The last thing you expect when turning your head towards the shady end of the bar is to see Mr. _I Got A Truck And Am Ready To Fuck You Up_ sitting there, nursing his whiskey, a similar shot in equally magnetizing colour sitting in front of him.

When he catches your eye from beneath the shadow that obscures the upper half of his face (at least you _think_ he does), he raises his glass at you in a mock-salute, then curls a finger of his other hand in an unmistakeable _come hither_ gesture.

 

You can feel your mouth going dry in about five seconds flat and deep down, something uncurls, whispers _look at him, look at the way he looks at you_.

If there was something akin to sexual epiphany in physiological layman’s terms, you’d be dry orgasming and shaking through the aftershocks right about now.

 

Instead, you leave your half-melted Long Island Ice Tea behind and, shot in hand, make your way over to where he’s half-sitting, half leaning against one of the tall bar stools, one foot on the ground, one bent to rest on the railing. The slope mimics the curve of his inner thigh muscles.

He could probably crush your head between his thighs. Or with one large, wide-fingered hand.

You don’t know whether to be terrified or aroused or _both_.

 

Both of you pretend like you don’t know exactly where this is headed (the bathroom, you figure, he doesn’t look the type of guy to take you home and wine/dine you before getting a ride up to anal city, population: you) and he clinks his shot glass against yours, eyes raking up and down your body in a way that simultaneously makes you feel dirty and glad you forewent the shirt with the hat (as beloved as it might be) for something a little more formfitting.

 

You expect him to start with something Casablanca-esque along the lines of “ _of all the gay joints, in all the towns, in all the worlds, you walk into here_ ” or even such a standard hook as “ _you aren’t looking like you’re from around here_ ”, but either you are seriously off your game (there is a time to add a Y there and that time has passed like Dave spun it off on his overpriced yet still enviable mixing equipment) or there’s something deeper to him than that underhanded smirk and an overpriced snapback.

 

“Bottoms up,” he says and you flounder for a second before he leans forward and clinks the bottom of his shot glass ( _tiny_ in his hand and it makes you wonder how he sees _you_ in comparison to himself) against the one you’re still holding.

 

“Oh,” you reply with all the grace eighteen years of continued social aversion have taught you and open your mouth to perhaps add a few more lines of asinine stuttering. Thankfully your paleocortex takes over at that moment and instead you use the opportunity to pour the entire contents of the shot into your mouth.

It stings and tastes more like floor cleaner than like alcohol, but you are acutely aware of the fact that he is watching you like a hawk watches a rabbit out on a field. No pussying out. You want nothing to do with that pussy. You’ve been a dog person all your life and if you’d have to choose you’d want someone to call you _good boy_ and that tangent spiralled into a flurry of your sexual preferences (men, dominating) so fast you pull yourself back from it with almost visceral disgust.

 

There might be a possibility your eyes are welling up from the strength of the shot, but John Doe knocks his back with well-practiced eyes and you _won’t_ give him the victory of seeing you cough.

Maybe you cough a little when he turns to set his empty glass on the bar again. By the way his upper lip twitches in a somewhat indulgent smile, he notices.

 _Damn_. There went your opportunity to play with the cool kids. You’ll be reduced to the target of lines like _You Can’t Sit With Us_ in no time.

 

“Like it?” he asks and now that he’s suddenly a lot closer than he was before, you can see his heavyset eyes deep in his orbital cavities. They’re almost luminescent, the way the strobe light flashes off the silver authenticity sticker of his cap and gets absorbed by the shadows around his irises.

“Thought you looked a bit young, else I woulda bought you something less neon.”

 

You snort and rub your tingling mouth. The alcohol still burns on your lips and you can see his eyes following your movements.

“I’m now at least one percent more Fluorescent Adolescent than I was before.”

 

The way his eyes crinkle when he smiles should be criminally outlawed. It reminds you of Dave’s rare moments of genuine amusement, of the late morning a few days ago when he woke you up after your drive up to Washington, the seven freckles on the bridge of his nose (you call him Anne of Green Gables, he threatens to send you to bed hungry like Marilla Cuthbert would) visible in the grey, pale light of a tired sun.

“I can appreciate a man who knows his music.”

…yeah, you are submitting the notion of putting any of the things his mouth can do under arrest to the jury for consideration. Let’s hope the fucker has a good defense aside from his white teeth and the tiny scar cleaving the left side of his lower lip, only visible as a grey-white line amidst the pink skin.

 

“Fuck yeah,” you reply and for a moment it’s like you’re shooting the shit with Dave or Jane ~~or Jake~~ or one of your metaphors.

“Nothing better than some Dangerous Animals.”

 

The moment you say it, something thrills along your skin and you are not sure whether to be vaguely aroused or moderately scared by the way his eyes go dark.

Neither of you say anything for a short while.

Then he picks up the last of his whiskey glass and downs it in a fluid motion, a singular drop escaping the edge of his mouth and leaving a trail of wet down his jaw you want to trace with your tongue.

One of his hands comes up to grasp your chin, thumb pressing against the soft edge of your mouth.

“Why don’t we take this somewhere you can tell me more about their fourth album, yeah?”

 

( _you know that i adore you?)_

 

He fucks you in one of the bathroom stalls after you blow him.

It’s rough and fast, but he doesn’t hurt you like you thought it would after everything that happened last year.

 

He fucks you and it’s _good_ , but he doesn’t touch you except to grasp your hips, pull you flush back against him while you scrabble for purchase at the smooth plastic of the waterbasin above the toilet. Yeah, it’s all very romantic.

 

He fucks you and it bears repeating, because while you close your eyes and still imagine Dave, still imagine his lean arms, his perpetual three-in-the-morning-i-can-barely-sleep-in-this-casino stubble, it’s his voice that you come to when he slams something inside of you that make you shudder all over and come untouched to his voice telling you _if you could see yourself now, if you could see the way you flush all over_.

 

Afterwards, you sit at the edge of your toilet seat and watch Bro (somewhere between you pulling down his pants and his hands in your hair he told you to call him that, _just Bro_ and you’ll be damned if it didn’t make you cream your proverbial panties right then and there) zip himself up, as unflappable as before.

The only witness to his slightly dishevelled state are the nail marks you left on his lower back before he pulled you up, bent you over and proceeded to finger you so well and good you almost sobbed into your arm. That, and his distinctly ruffled hair, but when he pulls on his snapback again, tugging the brim low, even that is gone.

 

The two of you don’t say much, but before he leaves he bends forward again to ruffle your hair just like your brother did, that one time at night. It feels like an eon away.

“You’re a real good kid, ain’t you?” he tells you and his voice is almost gentle.

“I got one like you at home. Y’all always burn yourselves to keep others warm.”

 

You look at him and don’t say _inside your eyes was just the match I used to set myself on fire_ , but you think he understands anyways.

 

Bro pulls back and turns to leave.

Pauses.

Then sighs and pulls a pen and a crumpled receipt out of _fuck_ knows where, scribbling something at the back of it and tugs you up by the lashes of your belt. You feel his hand pushing the thin paper into your back pocket. It would almost be touching if he weren’t giving your ass a firm squeeze at the same time.

 

“Call me sometime when you feel like it,” his voice echoes from the bathroom tiles, already with his back to you.

“Way you needed it right now, I imagine you got a lot to let loose.”

 

And then he’s gone, nothing but the slam of a door and a receipt for a pack of Marlboro Reds and a large coffee with cream pressed against the thread of your favourite pair of jeans.

 

You don’t move for a very long time.

 

_(slow it down, slow it down, slow it down.)_

 

You find Roxy somewhere in the corner with the green suit from before.

She’s visibly smitten, but when you take her arm and tell her _we need to leave_ , she turns away without a word.

You almost feel sorry for the poor individual you robbed of Roxy’s company, but the two of you are gone before Green Suit can say another word.

  
She doesn’t let go of you all the way home.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm apologize to everyone who thought this was going to turn out well.

**Author's Note:**

> I have stumbled back into this fandom about three years later with a vengeance and an acute feeling of melancholia.
> 
> thekingofcarvenstone.tumblr.com


End file.
